Inspired by some poor relatives who fall for every form of snake oil Alex Jones and company peddle, I had a thought about eating clay.

Back when I was in school and would come across the word Pica, it was always defined as something like "The compulsion to eat things that aren't food, i.e. clay." Clay was always the example. While eating clay is probably generally pointless, and probably only very helpful if you've ingested some strong poison, clays do contain several minerals, and organisms can adapt to crave things they need but don't understand, so is it possible that craving clay can in some limited circumstances stem from a mineral deficiency and thus be a rational response?

It is technically called "geophagy," or "plastophagy." It is common world wide. The popular over the counter nostrum "Kaopectate" was originally the clay kaolin, and pectin. Later the clay attapulgite, AKA plagorskyite was used instead of kaolin. In Yucatec Maya attapulgite is called "Sak Lu'um," and is commonly eaten to settle upset stomach, and diarrhea.

--------------"Science is the horse that pulls the cart of philosophy."

Inspired by some poor relatives who fall for every form of snake oil Alex Jones and company peddle, I had a thought about eating clay.

Back when I was in school and would come across the word Pica, it was always defined as something like "The compulsion to eat things that aren't food, i.e. clay." Clay was always the example. While eating clay is probably generally pointless, and probably only very helpful if you've ingested some strong poison, clays do contain several minerals, and organisms can adapt to crave things they need but don't understand, so is it possible that craving clay can in some limited circumstances stem from a mineral deficiency and thus be a rational response?

It is technically called "geophagy," or "plastophagy." It is common world wide. The popular over the counter nostrum "Kaopectate" was originally the clay kaolin, and pectin. Later the clay attapulgite, AKA plagorskyite was used instead of kaolin. In Yucatec Maya attapulgite is called "Sak Lu'um," and is commonly eaten to settle upset stomach, and diarrhea.

So there's a fight here in Canada over a Texas oil company sending Alberta asphalt through a pipeline to the BC coast to try to sell overseas. The federal gov't is saying it's going to happen because it's "in the national interest".

Serious, but unfortunately because of our friend in the Caribbean I can't hear the words "constitutional crisis" without giggling.

--------------"[A] book said there were 5 trillion witnesses. Who am I supposed to believe, 5 trillion witnesses or you? That shit's, like, ironclad. " -- stevestory

"Wow, you must be retarded. I said that CO2 does not trap heat. If it did then it would not cool down at night." Joe G

Although most medical practitioners balk at the idea of their patients ditching fruit and vegetables, the all-meat diet has been embraced by a cluster of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, who describe themselves as “bitcoin carnivores”, a phenomenon previously reported by Motherboard.

“Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat [government-backed] money, and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food,” said Michael Goldstein, a “bitcoin and meat maximalist” base in Austin, Texas. “Once someone has grown capable of seeing beyond the lies and myths that experts peddle in one domain, it becomes easier to see beyond them in other domains as well.”

PBS NOVA: To Corals, Plastic Might Taste Like FoodSea turtles spot plastic bags and mistake them for jellyfish. Birds get entwined in plastic and choke to death. Corals, it turns out, could be even worse off—to them, some of the chemicals in plastic might taste like food.

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Teve Tory: some plastic molecules could conceivably be broken down in a biologically useful way. Maybe evolution will figure out how to digest polypropylene into glucose or something.

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{name redacted} Teve Tory ...Did Evolution know that plastic would be in its Organic composition ?.

For anyone whom it may concern, Patheos pulled the plug on Warren Throckmorton's blog two days ago without warning. So far they have only offered a generic "your blog does not fit our strategic objectives". One wonders what that might be given that the blogroll over there it a veritable cornucopia or varied beliefs (and none) even within their subcategories of faiths (and none). Warren is quite talented and had a strong following.

He speculates that it might be once of his most recent posts and notes, while making clear he is indeed speculating, that Joe Gregory (chairman of BN Media who owns Patheos) is a NRA megadonor and that he had recently posted an article criticizing the lack of any evidence for the repeated claim that the NRA specifically helped slaves arm and protect themselves after emancipation.

His article was in response to Diamond and Silk, those two idiotic supporters of Trump and Fox "contributors", who spoke at the NRA's last convention and parroted that claim which typically goes hand in hand with the rhetoric about how the evil Demon-crats not only want to take everyone's guns away but also want to keep blacks "on the plantation" by keeping them poor and dependent on handouts.

It seems the most plausible given the wide range of content that's available on Patheos, within which Warren fits right in. But, it's probably unlikely we'll hear the real reason and the whole thing is a shame really. Warren is one of the few Christian bloggers I actual admire and follow as his goal is not to cheerlead for his team but to clean up his own house.

Of course that there is another possibility, that his criticism and debunking of guys like Barton or the corruption and hypocrisy of other evangelical leaders might have finally got someone who supports one of them and had a string to pull and got Warren booted. It's a shame, I really like the guy.

Anyway, with someone's help he got his content moved to a new site. Of course, as is the problem with Discus and other "commenting content" services, it's unlikely that all the conversations and information contained in those comments will be recovered/transferred.

JUNE 15, 2018 BY HEMANT MEHTA 31 COMMENTSOn Wednesday, the Colorado State Board of Education voted 4-3 to adopt the “Next Generation Science Standards,” which teachers and other experts in the field believe students must know in order to be prepared for college.

The new standards focus on scientific methods of inquiry, rather than rote memorization, which is a much better way to have students learn the material so that it sticks in their minds.

38 states have already adopted the standards; Colorado will be the 39th.

Some of the Democrats on the board were skeptical at first, according to Erica Meltzer of Chalkbeat, but they were won over by science teachers who told them their students were experiencing more of those “aha” moments you live for as an educator.

The three Republicans on the board — Steve Durham, Joyce Rankin, and Debora Scheffel — voted against the plan. Take a wild guess as to why…

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Critics fear that not all classroom teachers will be capable of delivering the “aha” moments and that students could miss out on critical information that would prepare them for more advanced study.

That fear was one reason all three Republican members of the state board voted no on the new standards. They also disliked the way the standards treated climate change as a real phenomenon. Nationally, the standards have drawn opposition from religious and cultural conservatives over climate change, evolution, and even the age of the earth.

In other words, the Republicans didn’t like the new science standards because they included science.It makes as much sense as opposing math standards for including multiplication.

The National Center for Science Education’s Glenn Branch said last year that the old standards needed revision because they were “pretty wishy-washy.” For example, one of the standards said, “Human actions such as burning fossil fuels might impact Earth’s climate.” Might.

The new standards are much more clear and accurate (emphasis mine):

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Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming).

Colorado students are lucky that their state board of education includes a small Democratic majority that accepts science since they can always overrule the Republicans who refuse to acknowledge reality.

This makes me think of a discussion I had with a Canadian friend the other day. He told me, and I couldn't disagree, "In the 1980s and 1990s scientists told us about the hole in the ozone layer and we all banded together to fight it. If they did it now, half your country would scream that they were liars and God would never allow a hole to form in his perfect creation."

JUST SO: THE MICROBE-TO-MAN EVOLUTION STORY IS DUMB, BAD SCIENCE. WHY DO OUR KIDS LEARN IT AS FACT?

9:36 PM 06/15/2018F. LaGard Smith | Former law professor and the compiler and narrator of 'The Daily Bible'

Dare suggest that America’s school children should be alerted to scientific problems with microbe-to-man evolution, and you can safely predict an outcry from evolutionists along two fronts. First, they protest, there must surely be a hidden agenda to teach the biblical creation story (including Adam and Eve), or the suspected subterfuge of “creation science” or the (even sneakier) argument from intelligent design. Then comes the usual party-line: “You can’t challenge evolution in the classroom, because that would violate the separation of church and state!”

Why the knee-jerk outcry against nefarious creationism even if none of the above scenarios are being proposed? Why is the vociferous protest invariably framed in terms of religion rather than science? Simple logic. Even Darwin knew that his naturalistic theory had but one real alternative: the realm of the miraculous, which is to say divine creation. Which, if taught in the classroom would—God forbid—breach Thomas Jefferson’s famous (if not strictly constitutional) “wall of separation.”

But do evolutionists who insist that religion’s creation story is the only alternative to evolution’s own creation story not realize the peril of that position? What if those challenging Darwin’s grand theory turned out to be (Holy Scopes!) not Bible-thumpers, but scientists?

As it happens, there’s already a hush-hush open secret among scientists: the quietly acknowledged “Queen of evolutionary problems” — the origin of sex — which, after countless studies, stubbornly defies evolutionary explanation.

Why is evolutionary sex so threatening that it dare not even be mentioned in textbooks or science classes? Given the unique nature of gendered, sexual meiosis compared with non-gendered, asexual mitosis, the first-ever generation of sexual reproduction would have required 1) a never-before-seen male organism and a novel female organism, 2) magically having compatible chromosomes, and 3) a death-defying process of precisely halving their chromosomes, mixing them together in a revolutionary way, and then recombining to produce, not a clone (as in asexual replication), but a unique offspring unlike any on the planet. Not to mention the minor details of geographic proximity and an evolved instinct to mate—all absolutely required in round one of sex to get the sexual ball rolling.

That’s only for starters. What school children must also never know is that the familiar “tree of evolution” (illustrating evolution’s bedrock assumption of common descent) could never have happened in actual fact. Natural selection could not possibly have provided simultaneous, on-time delivery of the first compatible male/female pair of each of millions of sexually-unique species. (Merely consider the weird, cannibalistic sex of the praying mantis! Or, even more problematic, the first-ever male and female reptiles, mating and reproducing as no amphibians before them.)

In his best-selling book, Why Evolution is True, even skeptic Jerry Coyne keenly appreciates where the crux of the evolution debate lies. “A better title for The Origin of Species,” says Coyne, “would have been The Origin of Adaptations. While Darwin did figure out how and why a single species changes over time (largely by natural selection), he never explained how one species splits in two.” (Would it breach “the wall of separation” to share an evolutionist’s corrective with school children?)

Coyne’s own attempt to hypothesize how species might have “split” has to do with “geographic isolation” causing genetic diversions. Problem is, there simply aren’t enough isolating mountains, rivers, or lakes on the planet to explain the origin of tens of millions of different species. So, we’re back to hard scientific reality. If there’s no evolved first generation of any given species, then there could be no evolution into any other species, nor certainly any higher species, most especially us humans.

Forget religion. Forget the Bible. Forget teaching creationism. On its own terms, the romanticized, politicized, (increasingly even theologized!) microbe-to-man evolution story presented as undeniable fact in the schoolroom is simply bad science. Why should anyone insist that students be taught bad science?

You say not even serious problems with evolution ought to be objectively presented in the classroom? I understand the danger. Do that, and bright young minds might well conclude that the sacrosanct evolution story is not science at all, merely science fiction. Then what creation story will they believe?

LaGard Smith is a former law professor (principally at Pepperdine University) and scholar in residence for Christian Studies (Lipscomb University). He is the compiler and narrator of The Daily Bible and is the author of over 30 books. His most recent book is Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem: Exposing Evolution’s Fatal Flaw—The Origin of Sex.

A creationist that's a lawyer? Someone should sue him for copyright infringement.

You guys got me drawn in the shit pile...

LOL! I went over there (as Tim H) to check it out. The amazingly ignorant potty-mouth posting as Joe Moricone just admitted he's none other than our favorite IDiot Joke Gallien!

This is gonna be good.

--------------"CO2 can't re-emit any trapped heat unless all the molecules point the right way" "Global warming can't be real because it still gets cooler at night" "All the evidence supports Creation baraminology"